Is it possible to bridge two faiths, to cross through myriad cultures, and to seek to understand some of today's great global crises from the viewpoint of the other? With an estimated 5 million Muslims in the United States, Islam is a faith that invites attention. Beginning with the perceived dissonance of east and west, of Christianity and Islam, and working through the complexity of antagonistic worldviews that have been perpetuated over the centuries, Engaging Islam from a Christian Perspective seeks to rediscover the deep interconnectedness between these two world faiths. The political upheavals experienced across North Africa and the Middle East and the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and Boko Haram in north east Nigeria indicate the urgency and importance of establishing constructive dialogue. This book sets local dialogue in the wider context of the significant international conversations that have been taking place between the two faiths. The emergence of Scriptural Reasoning as a major tool of inter-religious dialogue is explained and illustrated. However, this perspective is balanced by a consideration of how dialogue can proceed while acknowledging the diatribe, hostility, and violence that in some parts of the world terrorize adherents of both faiths. Re-establishing a dialogue of trust, three areas are explored that reveal the potential radical outcomes of meaningful dialogue. An important corrective is given as to how women perceive themselves as Muslims; the question of whether one can be actively gay and Muslim is raised; and the complex issues surrounding inter-faith worship are sensitively explored. Engaging Islam from a Christian Perspective offers the intriguing possibility that local conversation can bring about profound transformation to both faiths.

Abby Chava Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, profoundly isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of an eighteenth-century Eastern European enclave, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a rabbinical dynastic family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Stein felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. Without access to TV or the internet and never taught English, she suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood into mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family and her way of life.

When the daily business news breaks away from stories of profit and loss, it often shines a spotlight on ethical failures. But Christians aim to be ethical in all the areas of daily life and work-not just when the spotlight is on them. For those facing the many questions and quandaries of doing business with ethical integrity, Alec Hill offers a place to begin. In this third edition of a popular textbook on business ethics, Hill carefully explores the foundational Christian concepts of holiness, justice, and love. These keys to God's character, he argues, are also the keys to Christian business ethics. Hill then shows how some common responses to business ethics fall short of a fully Christian mindset. Using penetrating case studies on such pressing topics as employer-employee relations, discrimination and affirmative action, and environmental damage, he clothes principles in concrete business situations. Updated throughout, and with a new chapter on international business, this new edition of Just Business is an excellent introduction to business ethics for students, and a timely refresher for men and women already in the marketplace.

Most people don't become nurses because of the pay, working conditions, or the convenient hours. Men and women become nurses because they want to make a difference in the lives of others through the use of their compassionate skills and hard work. Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul, Second Dose, underscores why nurses enter the profession . . . and why they stay.

Tthis book emphasizes triumph in the face of overwhelming odds. A timeless testament to the indomitable human spirit, this collection is sure to encourage, support, comfort and, most of all, inspire all readers for years to come.

A dose of inspiration for caregiving professionals and the millions of souls who help care for family and friends.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the charismatic leader of the Chabad Hasidic movement and its designated Messiah. Yet when he died in 1994, the messianic fervor he inspired did not subside. Through traditional means and digital technologies, a group of radical Hasidim, the Meshichistim, still keep the Rebbe palpably close-engaging in ongoing dialogue, participating in specific rituals, and developing an ever-expanding visual culture of portraits and videos. With Us More Than Ever focuses on this group to explore how religious practice can sustain the belief that a messianic figure is both present and accessible. Yoram Bilu documents a unique religious experience that is distinctly modern. The rallying point of the Meshichistim-that the Rebbe is "with us more than ever"-is sustained through an elaborate system that creates the sense of his constant and pervasive presence in the lives of his followers. The virtual Rebbe that emerges is multiple, visible, accessible, and highly decentralized, the epicenter of a truly messianic movement in the twenty-first century. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and cognitive science with nuanced analysis, Bilu documents the birth and development of a new religious faith, describing the emergence of new spiritual horizons, a process common to various religious movements old and new.

Bonhoeffer's New Beginning investigates the ethics of making new beginnings after devastating moral rupture. The work argues that new beginnings must be made in order to sustain the fundamental convictions that it is good to exist and that life in the world with others should be loved without exclusion. Bonhoeffer's ethics of new beginning is set in conversation with the thought of four moral philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Glover, and Jonathan Lear. DeCort argues that Bonhoeffer's ethics of new beginning opens and energizes a more promising, world-affirming moral vision with radical hope for new beginnings vis-a-vis the perceived absence of God in the face of devastation.

Islamic scriptural sources offer potentially radical notions of equality. Yet medieval Islamic philosophers chose to establish a hierarchical, male-centered virtue ethics. In Gendered Morality, Zahra Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition. Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics. In close readings of foundational texts by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani, she interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. Yet in the course of prescribing ethical behavior, the ethicists speak of complex gendered and human relations that contradict their hierarchies. Their metaphysical premises about the nature of the divine, humanity, and moral responsibility indicate a potential egalitarian core. Gendered Morality offers a vital and disruptive new perspective on patriarchal Islamic ethics and metaphysics, showing the ways in which the philosophical tradition can support the aims of gender justice and human flourishing.

How do we identify and judge beauty? Does it distract us from more pressing questions and issues? Is beauty the handmaiden of privilege? Or can it be found in everyday, ordinary things? Whatever happened to beauty in contemporary Islam? Do Muslims have a inkling of what beauty is and why is it significant? This issue of Critical Muslim looks at beauty from a number of perspectives -- from beauty in the Qur'an and the Beautiful Divine Names to racism and the beauty industry, politics of fashion, calligraphy, plastic surgery, female wrestling, Muslim beauty contests and the male and female gaze.

The Jewish intellectual tradition has a long and complex history that has resulted in significant and influential works of scholarship. In this book, the authors suggest that there is a series of common principles that can be extracted from the Jewish intellectual tradition that have broad, even life-changing, implications for individual and societal achievement. These principles include respect for tradition while encouraging independent, often disruptive thinking; a precise system of logical reasoning in pursuit of the truth; universal education continuing through adulthood; and living a purposeful life. The main objective of this book is to understand the historical development of these principles and to demonstrate how applying them judiciously can lead to greater intellectual productivity, a more fulfilling existence, and a more advanced society.

Analayo outlines how to meditate on emptiness, according to early Buddhism. His presentation is geared to practical concerns, something that the reader can put into practice when sitting on the cushion, with an appendix giving a translation of the key discourses from the Pali and Chinese. This brings out an aspect of early Buddhism so far fairly neglected, providing an important perspective on emptiness as a form of meditation in relation to later developments, and is a practical companion to his bestselling book: Satipatthana.

There are few ideals of character as distinctive and divisive as the ancient virtue of 'greatness of soul'. A larger-than-life virtue embodying nothing less than a vision of human greatness, it has often been seen as a relic of the Homeric world and its honour-loving heroes. In philosophy, it found its most celebrated expression in Aristotle's ethics, and it has lived on in the minds of philosophers and theologians in different forms ever since. Yet among the many lives this virtue has led in intellectual history, one remains conspicuously unwritten. This is the life it led in the Arabic tradition. A virtue of Greek warriors and their democratic epigones - what happened when this splendid virtue made landfall in the Islamic world? This world, too, had its native heroes, who bequeathed their conception of extraordinary virtue to posterity. Heroic virtue is above all expressed in a boundless aspiration to what is greatest. Could we admire such virtue enough to want it as our own? What can we learn from the Arabic tradition of the virtues? In answering these questions, Sophia Vasalou elucidates a larger family of virtues that are united by their preoccupation with all things great: the 'virtues of greatness'. An important constituent of the character ideals expounded within the Islamic world, this type of virtue tells us as much about the content of these ideals as about their kaleidoscopic genealogies.

This title features the teachings of Jesus and Buddha about how to create an abundant life by focusing your attention on your connection with the vibrant presence of the divine within.

Every month, a ragtag group of Londoners gather in the site known as Crossbones Graveyard to commemorate the souls of medieval prostitutes believed to be buried there-the "Winchester Geese," women who were under the protection of the Church but denied Christian burial. In the Borough of Southwark, not far from Shakespeare's Globe, is a pilgrimage site for self-identified misfits, nonconformists, and contemporary sex workers who leave memorials to the outcast dead. Ceremonies combining raucous humor and eclectic spirituality are led by a local playwright, John Constable, also known as John Crow. His interpretation of the history of the site has struck a chord with many who feel alienated in present-day London. Sondra L. Hausner offers a nuanced ethnography of Crossbones that tacks between past and present to look at the historical practices of sex work, the relation of the Church to these professions, and their representation in the present. She draws on anthropological approaches to ritual and time to understand the forms of spiritual healing conveyed by the Crossbones rites. She shows that ritual is a way of creating the present by mobilizing the stories of the past for contemporary purposes.

Islam on Campus explores how Islam is represented, perceived, and lived within higher education in Britain. It considers the changing nature of university life, and the place of religion within it. Even while many universities maintain ambiguous or affirming orientations to religious institutions for reasons to do with history and ethos, much western scholarship has presumed higher education to be a strongly secularising force. This framing has resulted in religion often being marginalised or ignored as a cultural irrelevance by the university sector. However, recent times have seen higher education increasingly drawn into political discourses that problematize religion in general, and Islam in particular, as an object of risk. Using the largest data set yet collected in the UK, Islam on Campus explores university life and the ways in which ideas about Islam and Muslim identities are produced, experienced, perceived, appropriated, and objectified. The volume considers the role universities and Muslim higher education institutions play in the production, reinforcement, and contestation of emerging narratives about religious difference. This is a culturally nuanced treatment of universities as sites of knowledge production, and contexts for the negotiation of perspectives on culture and religion among an emerging generation. This collaborative study demonstrates the urgent need to release Islam from its official role as the othered, or the feared. When universities achieve this we will be able to help students of all affiliations and of none to be citizens of the campus in preparation for being citizens of the world.